The Principles of Application Health

You can think of application health as the reality or consequence of applying good application management. Health can be seen as a measurable assessment across the whole of the application. It’s really an attempt at understanding how well the application is performing so that you can help it excel at what it’s supposed to do. Good health indicates that all the components involved in completing a specific process or action are operating so that the results consistently meet or exceed expectations. Obviously, poor health is the opposite.

A health snapshot can be taken at several levels. At the start is the complete picture, which helps you adopt the aforementioned holistic type approach. Next down is relative health, comparing the system against other existing applications or systems to look for interesting differences and similarities. Finally, because the information is available, you can review a very fine-grained level of detail by drilling into the health of one or more specific capabilities or activities.